Tony Cortez is back on his horse, training three to four times a day and feeling good about where he is headed.
For the unbeaten 24-year-old mixed martial artist, promoted by Combate Global, contemplating the alternative can be traumatic.
“It’s scary to talk about,” Cortez said a week out from his sixth professional MMA bout at lightweight on Thursday inside a newly designed studio on the Estrella TV lot in Burbank.
Cortez is not someone who scares easily, but escaping the grip of the pills he was taking – fentanyl disguised as oxycodone, which he did so much of it stopped getting him high – remains a lot to deal with.
That’s OK, though. He wants people to know. He wants people to find his story and feel like they too can overcome addiction or whatever else is blocking their path. He wants his struggle to make a difference.
“I think, honestly, maybe I’m a freakin’ narcissist or somethin’s wrong with me, but I really believe I’m somebody who’s going to help change so many lives with everything that I do,” Cortez said. “Obviously I’m going to fight and become a champion. I think I’ll be able to help so many people. I think me being a good example – being married, having a family, being a good father, being a good husband – is going to help so many people.”
At one point not long ago, the cascading effects of a dislocated collarbone in 2019, during his senior year at Centennial High School in Corona, would have made the possibility of helping anyone, including himself, unlikely.
A kid who couldn’t wait to move beyond the garage he shared with his sister until the age of 17 suddenly had to find purpose in something other than being the first person in his family to attend college.
“That was supposed to be the time when I changed my life,” Cortez said. “I guess it put me in a really bad depression.”
Offers to wrestle in college came and went, leaving one of California’s top-ranked high schoolers spiraling away from a reality he worked to achieve despite bouncing around the Southland with his mom and sister for much of his youth (from Wilmington to Corona to East L.A. to Long Beach to Watts and back to Corona).
Cortez soon saw the end of high school as leading into a future that no longer existed.
Was he meant to wind up in the same situation as his dad, wasting away in prison?
“That’s really what I thought,” Cortez recalled.
The drugs, counterfeit blue M30s, coupled with depression in the midst of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic made Cortez go “crazy in my mind,” he said. He was sure that he would either self-harm or something terrible was bound to happen.
Now sober, Cortez has come out the other side, and once more is on the cusp of letting his good prevail over his bad.
“I always knew there was more for me,” he said.
When Cortez officially entered MMA in 2021 as an amateur, he already had plenty of encounters with a sport he first saw more than a decade prior watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship with his grandfather.
Cortez wanted to be like Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell, “the bad-ass guy who everybody is scared of.” At the age of 10, he began training at the UFC Gym in Corona. He was quick to spar and mix it up with older boys, and over the years ventured across Southern California to soak in as much MMA knowledge as he could get.
Undefeated after eight fights inside the state’s challenging amateur system, Cortez still had plenty to sort out. He took professionalism for granted when he debuted with Combate Global in 2023, failing to realize how much further he had to go.
Missing weight in 2024 led to another harsh lesson. Following his third fight for Combate Global, a promotion founded by Campbell McLaren, one of the original creators of the UFC, Cortez was cut from his contract.
“It was disappointing because he can talk and really can fight,” McClaren said. “He’s pretty scary.”
Cortez went searching again, moving a half dozen times, leaving old gyms, finding new ones that didn’t work out the way he hoped, while trying to be responsible. Again, he lived out of a garage, this time with his fiancée by his side, or they slept on a blowup bed in his aunt’s living room.
In the process, he realized there are no shortcuts.
“This is it,” Cortez told himself. “You’ve got to do the right thing every single day. Wake up and make the right choices every single day.”
Getting a second shot at fighting for Combate Global, which garnered strong Spanish-language viewership for MMA in recent years on Univision, “means the world to me,” Cortez said.
To prove the point, following a move to Santa Ana a few months ago, Cortez joined respected trainer Colin Oyama’s gym in Irvine, where he said he is intent on practicing what it’s like to be a pro while preparing to fight Cruz Garcia (5-0) during Combate Global’s Estrella TV premiere (10 p.m. Thursday).
“If you’re confident and speak positive about yourself and do the work, then you’re going to win,” Cortez said. “And I’m an example of that because I lost so much in my life. Now I made that switch and I’m winning.”
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